by Aaron Mahnke
They claimed it was an extraterrestrial, protecting the ship it had just crash-landed. Keep in mind that this was 1952. The Roswell, New Mexico, incident had taken place just five years before, and many people were expecting it to happen again: a real-life UFO crash.
Later reports suggest something much less fantastical, though. On that very same night, a meteor had been sighted crossing the sky over Maryland, Pennsylvania, and—you guessed it—West Virginia. And that mysterious, armless, pointy-headed creature that flew toward them? Nothing more than a local owl.
Our world is full of things that are hard to explain—things that frighten us and cause us to doubt our safety. It might happen less and less often in this connected, modern culture of ours, but it’s still part of our legacy. People have always seen things that are hard to believe.
Sometimes, though, people see what they want to see, rather than reality. The challenge lies in distinguishing between the two. Fact or fiction? Truth or lie? Figment of the imagination or something more? But when dozens of people manage to see the same strange thing, our clarity has a way of falling apart.
IT’S A BIRD, IT’S A PLANE
For as long as we’ve been looking up, humans have been seeing things they can’t explain. And every time it’s happened, those experiences get framed within whatever worldview or experience people had at the time. One of those common interpretations, for a very long time, was sky serpents.
The English county of Devon has played host to at least two sightings of a mysterious event that was recorded as a “twisting serpent” in the sky. In both 1388 and 1762, something long and glowing appeared in the English skies, remaining visible to multiple witnesses for more than six minutes.
In 1857, the crew of a steamboat on the Missouri River in Nebraska saw something similar. Witnesses later described it as resembling “a great undulating serpent, in and out of the lowering clouds, breathing fire.” Sixteen years later, a number of farmers in the Texas town of Bonham saw something in the sky that defied all explanation. They said it was twisting and writhing like a snake, but enormous and yellow.
Witnesses seemed to come from all walks of life. In 1897, a Michigan paperboy named John Rosa stopped to chat with a local police officer while he was out at four in the morning on his delivery route. Both Rosa and the officer looked up and saw an enormous silvery serpent fly across the sky. Similar events have been recorded in Brazil, South Carolina, Maryland, and northern Europe, and those accounts span centuries. Clearly, something was going on.
But most of those sightings are easy to explain away with a bit of knowledge about how meteorological events work, and with a bit of an open mind. Comets, meteors, northern lights…all of these natural, regularly occurring events could explain the odd sightings people have claimed to be fiery snakes in the sky. As is so often the case, when we see what we want to, it prevents us from seeing everything else.
But other sightings are harder to explain. When they get closer to the earth and even stand on solid ground, our ability to filter the truth from the fantasy starts to break down. The mysterious creature witnessed multiple times in Cornwall, England, is a prime example of this, and to this day, it hasn’t been easily explained away.
In April 1976, the Melling family from Lancaster was vacationing in Cornwall. On the twelfth of that month, Don Melling’s two daughters—twelve-year-old June and nine-year-old Vicky—were exploring the woods near a church in Mawnan. While they were there, they reported seeing a strange, bird-like man in the air above the church. It frightened them so much that they convinced their parents to pack up and end their vacation early.
Nearly three months later, in early July of that year, more sightings were reported near Mawnan church. Again, two girls—this time Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry—heard a hissing sound in the night sky and looked up to see something unexplainable. They described it as a “big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man.” They also added a new detail: red, glowing eyes. It was sighted again the following day by three other travelers, and it’s been seen off and on for years ever since.
Back in the United States, similar creatures have been witnessed. In December 1975, two police officers in Texas saw something they would never be able to forget. One morning they were patroling the city of Harlingen when something flew over their car. According to their report, that something was a giant bird with a wingspan that measured more than ten feet across.
A few days later, a similar creature was sighted by two local teens. When they reported it to their parents, everyone headed out to have a look. All they found were a set of enormous tracks in the dirt—tracks made by large, three-toed feet. They made the evening news for that discovery, and then the community erupted in hysteria. Half a dozen more sightings were reported over the following month.
The officers in Harlingen later admitted that whatever it was they’d seen could have been a pelican. Maybe. They weren’t sure, really. But others absolutely insisted it was an enormous bird of mysterious origins. Heck, one man claimed he was even attacked by it. That many sightings…well, it makes you wonder what was really going on.
And that’s the trouble with all of these stories, isn’t it? There are always loose ends. Bits and pieces that can’t be explained away, no matter how expertly we apply logic to them. Which, of course, is why they’re still told to this day.
It seems that these stories always have two sides: the passionate eyewitness and the cold voice of reason. And that’s pretty much par for the course for humans. We often refuse to believe the things that others claim to have seen just because those stories drift outside the realm of accepted reality. Most of the details, along with the mystery itself, can be explained away with reasonable logic.
But sometimes there’s more than one event, more than a handful of sightings, more detail or evidence than logic can explain away. Sometimes the reports are so strong that they become hard to ignore.
When the unexplainable becomes the believable, that’s when things truly become horrifying.
SHADOWS AND LIGHT
When World War II ended in 1945, a number of military-related factories around the United States were closed up and either abandoned or converted into something more practical. The Gopher Ordnance Works in Rosemount, Minnesota, for example, is now a concrete skeleton of what it once was. The Dodge Chicago plant was first transitioned into a shopping mall, and now a portion of it is used to manufacture candy.
About six miles north of the West Virginia town of Point Pleasant, a TNT plant and storage facility was built, but it shut its doors after the war ended. It was constructed on property that had originally been a game preserve. But rather than transition it back when they were done, the manufacturing facilities were simply left to rot, including the dozens of concrete igloos that had been used for storage.
Today it’s used as a wildlife preserve, and homes have even been built nearby. Still, it’s probably safe to say that after the war ended, the old TNT factory property didn’t see much action. Not until the mid-1960s, at least, when something unusual began to take place.
On the night of November 15, 1966, a car entered the abandoned property. Inside were two young couples: Steve and Mary Malette, and Roger and Linda Scarberry. They were just out looking for some innocent fun, and that search had led them onto one of the dirt roads that cut through the old factory grounds.
The car was full of laughter, conversation, and the beat of the radio, but all of that came to an end when the very edge of their headlight beams illuminated something odd. Linda Scarberry later described it as an unnaturally large man-shaped figure. Most frightening, though, were the eyes, which glowed in the darkness with a red light.
Whatever they’d seen, the thing didn’t appear to see them. At least, it didn’t react to their presence. I have a hard time understanding how the bright headlights of a car could fail to catch the attention of anything close to sentient in the middle of a dark wildlife preserve, but according to all four of the witnesses, i
t just sort of waddled off away from the road at a slow, rambling pace.
The two couples didn’t spend any time debating what they’d all seen. They didn’t stop and get out to investigate. They were too afraid to do anything other than turn the car around and head back toward the exit of the preserve as quickly as they could. All they wanted to do was get away. But that wasn’t going to be as easy as they thought.
A minute or two later, as they were winding their way back through the dirt roads that led to the exit, they saw it again. This time the four witnesses were able to get a better look at it. They described the same tall, human-like shape and red eyes, but said this time they were able to see something else: wings that stuck out from the center of the creature’s back, they said, “like an angel.” They weren’t able to see any arms, and the head was sort of indistinguishable from the body, but all of that could have been a trick of shadows and light.
It was something that seemed like a cross between a giant bird and an enormous man. Which was, of course, impossible. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t frightening. And when the creature spread its wings and flew after them, they were downright horrified. So they sped up.
Roger Scarberry later told the police that he managed to coax his old Chevy up to a hundred miles an hour, but when they glanced behind the car, the flying thing was still there, still chasing them. And over the roar of the engine they could all hear a sound. A sort of high-pitched squeaking noise. All of it—the sight of the creature, the eerie noise, and the fast pursuit—gave them the incentive they needed to head back to town as quickly as they could.
It was only after the car had entered the city limits of Point Pleasant and was bathed in bright electric light that the bird or creature—whatever it had really been—finally gave up and turned around. It quickly vanished into the night.
The two young couples were understandably terrified by what they’d seen. But they were also unanimous on the details. Something large, something that could fly and scream at them, had chased them all the way from the wildlife preserve into town. So they decided to tell the police.
Roger turned the car toward the Mason County courthouse, and before long they were reporting the events to an officer inside. The deputy sheriff agreed to send a handful of officers out to the preserve immediately, and the young couples bravely went with them. Unfortunately, they found nothing definitive that proved the couples’ story, though there were some tense moments. While searching the general area of the sighting, sounds could be heard in the darkness outside the glow of their flashlights. One of the officers even claimed he saw movement and a cloud of dust that could have been made by someone walking down a path, but whatever caused it remained hidden from view.
Most chilling of all, though, was when one of the officers saw what he described as a shadow in the night sky overhead. It seemed to be circling above one of the abandoned buildings, slow and deliberate, like a large bird.
Everyone got back in their cars, and they left as fast as they could.
FLEETING VISIONS
Oddly enough, the events of November 15 weren’t the first of their kind in the area. They were just the first to be given anything close to a reasonable amount of attention by the authorities and the press. Sightings of something large and extraordinary had actually been occurring in the area for years.
According to historian and professor James Gay Jones, the first local sighting might have occurred in the early 1900s. In that tale, multiple families in the area witnessed a creature that they described as man-sized, with a wingspan of more than twelve feet. They claimed that this man-bird had no discernible head, something that sounds oddly similar to the thing the two young couples witnessed in 1966.
In 1961, two people from Point Pleasant were driving south of town along the Ohio River when they saw something step out into the road in front of them. They described it as a large man, but covered in gray fur, or maybe feathers, with wings protruding from its back. A moment later it launched itself into the air and flew away.
On November 1, 1966, just two weeks before the frightening car chase and the police investigation, a number of National Guardsmen were outside at the armory, a military facility east of town, when they saw something in the trees nearby. It was perched on the branch of a tree in the distance, but all of the men agreed it was too large to be a bird. It was man-sized, they said. Maybe larger. This time, though, it was brown.
Then, just three days before the two young couples had their experience in Point Pleasant, five men saw something in Clendenin, a town about eighty miles to the southeast. Ken Duncan and his co-workers were digging a grave in the local cemetery, getting it ready for a burial later that day, when a large bird took off from one of the trees at the edge of the property. As it flew closer, though, all of the men became convinced it wasn’t a bird at all. It was as large as a man, but with wings.
After the events of November 15, all of those disconnected, unreported sightings started to get pulled into the larger story. The local newspaper, the Point Pleasant Register, ran a headline the next day that declared “Couples See Man-Sized Bird…Creature…Something.” It was an odd story, for sure. The paper just didn’t know what to do with it. And I don’t blame them.
The following evening, Raymond Wamsley drove north toward the wildlife preserve on his way to see a friend who lived in one of the homes built near the property there. With him in the car were his wife and another friend, Marcella Bennett. When they arrived at their friend’s house, they parked in a shadowy dirt lot across the road, then got out and approached the front porch.
Unfortunately, their friend wasn’t home, so they turned around and returned to their car. It was on their way back that they spotted a sight none of them would forget. Just a few feet from the car, farther back from the road in the darkness, something large seemed to rise up from the ground. It happened suddenly, and the sight of it horrified them. Bennett later described it as an enormous figure, roughly the shape of a human, but with glowing red eyes. They stood beside their car, paralyzed with fear, while they watched a pair of wings unfold from the creature’s back. And then it was gone.
They weren’t the last in town to see something that fit such an almost unbelievable description. On the morning of November 25, Tom Ury was driving to work just a couple of miles north of the wildlife preserve when he saw something on the side of the road. Maybe he thought it was a hitchhiker or a local out for a walk. Whatever he might have assumed, the closer he got to it, the less it made sense.
It was an enormous man-shaped figure, and as he passed it, the creature spread huge wings and took flight. Tom sped away, horrified by what he’d seen, but the thing—whatever it was—followed him. Tom reached seventy-five miles per hour, but it kept up, even circling his car. When it finally disappeared, Tom went home. He said he was just too frightened to work after that.
There were others. Connie Jo Carpenter saw something large on the twenty-seventh that flew toward her car. On the twenty-eighth, Richard West called the police in a panic. There was something on his neighbor’s roof, he told them. It was a man. With wings. Later an elderly man from Point Pleasant claimed he looked out his window and saw a winged man with gray fur and bright red eyes just standing there in his yard.
The sightings continued for months, sometimes in the area of Point Pleasant and sometimes farther away. The Ohio River valley seemed to be the focal point of many reported encounters with the creature, but the descriptions varied just enough to make that assumption far from definitive. And then, of course, there were the dreams.
A year after the 1966 sightings, multiple people claimed they were having nightmares about death, and they blamed them on the mysterious creature. One woman said her dreams involved Christmas presents and people drowning. Another woman dreamed of people dying in the nearby Ohio River. Each of them believed that the bird-man creature’s appearance had something to do with it. But, of course, these were just dreams, and as we all know, dreams don’t come tr
ue.
Or do they? On the evening of December 15, 1967, the nearby Silver Bridge, which connected Point Pleasant with Ohio to the west, collapsed into the river. When it did, it took forty-six lives with it. People driving home from work. Families returning from after-school programs. Folks coming back from their holiday shopping. And floating in the water, they said, among the wreckage of cars and metal support beams, were tiny pops of color.
Christmas presents.
PRECURSORS
There’s a lot to be said for seeing what we want to see. And when a whole community gets caught up in something as sensational as a man-sized bird-thing…well, it’s easy to see how things can get out of control, and fast. In the years since, there’ve even been stories in Point Pleasant of UFOs, of government cover-ups, and aliens. And the creature has been given a sensational, mysterious name: the Mothman.
Others, though, take a more logical approach, claiming that what people saw in every instance was just a large bird. Nothing more than shadows and hysteria convinced people that they were seeing something otherworldly. Biologists have suggested it was a sandhill crane. Or, much as with the events from 1952, it was just an owl, enlarged by the viewers’ adrenaline and an overactive imagination.
We see what we want to, whether we’re a skeptic or a believer. We wear our own pair of colored lenses, and they tint the world we see. Sometimes that causes us to dismiss things we should give more attention to. Other times it convinces us that the unexplainable is undeniable.
None of this, of course, sheds light on the odd connection between the sightings of these creatures and the tragedies that followed them. The first recorded appearance of the Point Pleasant creature, way back in the early 1900s, was said to have occurred just prior to “a tragic event.” And the collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967 certainly deepened that possible connection. Unlike the creature itself, though, those are harder to explain away with simple wildlife biology.